On Offsets and Posted Dates

We welcome guest blogger Caleb Smith. Caleb has worked on tax returns and tax transcript issues for several years. Before law school he worked for Prepare and Prosper as a Tax Program Manager for their VITA program. At Lewis and Clark Law School he participated in the excellent low income taxpayer clinic there run by my former colleague, Jan Pierce. Most recently Caleb has been working at Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid in their tax clinic. Next month he will join me as the new fellow at the Harvard Tax Clinic. Keith

When is an offset not a § 6402 offset? After the recent Tax Court memorandum opinion, Luque v. Commissioner, the answer seems to be only “when the offset didn’t actually happen.” And because of the nearly wholesale prohibition on Tax Court review of § 6402 offsets codified at § 6512(b)(4), checking to see if the offset actually happened is about as far as the court will go. The opinion serves as an illustration of the pitfalls many taxpayers face in getting to court, while also offering a look into the arcana of IRS transcript posted dates. Indeed, this latter endeavor appears to be the main objective of Judge Halpern in issuing the opinion.

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The facts of the case are fairly commonplace: taxpayer files a 2011 return showing a refund and the refund is credited in its entirety against a 2009 tax liability. In this instance, after the refund was credited the IRS issued a NOD for 2011, thus allowing the taxpayer into Court to argue (1) that the offset did not arise under § 6402 and (2), even if it did, the offset never actually was credited to 2009.

Prior to issuing the opinion the Court had essentially dashed the hopes that the liability giving rise to the offset, the 2009 liability, could be reviewed (i.e. didn’t arise under § 6402) in an earlier court order. It could be noted that the judge issuing the opinion, Judge Halpern, has been involved with previous cases questioning what is and is not an offset (found here with more insight on the matter provided by the First Circuit in appeal found here). But even though the Tax Court cannot “restrain or review” a § 6402 offset by examining if the taxpayer really owes the taxes being paid through the offset under § 6512(b)(4), Judge Halpern noted that it can look to see if the offset actually happened.

As this is usually a fairly straightforward inquiry (either the taxpayer had funds credited to a prior year or they didn’t), the import of the opinion seems to be elsewhere. Indeed, what appears to motivate the Court was the educational opportunity for tax practitioners in better understanding how IRS official records work. Judge Halpern almost explicitly acknowledges this rationale:

“On March 29, 2016, we issued an order concerning the motions in which we addressed and rejected petitioners’ jurisdictional argument. We, did not, however, dispose of the motions. Instead, we ordered respondent to address seeming anomalies between his representations and entries on the official records he submitted in support of his motion. Because there may be general interest in respondent’s reconciliation of those seeming anomalies […] we use this opportunity to make that reconciliation public.” [Emphasis added.] Luque at *3 – 4.

I’ll admit that as someone who frequently pores over IRS transcripts I counted myself as an enthusiastic member of the “general interest” Judge Halpern referred to. And yet, after reading the opinion, I couldn’t help but feel that the more important aspects of the decision remained elsewhere. But more on that later.

My naïve hope was that the opinion would give more insight on the meaning of IRS transaction codes. In my experience, the codes can be extraordinarily misleading or arbitrary. As one example, the notation “additional tax assessed” often does not mean that additional (i.e. “more”) tax was assessed, or even that any assessment action took place at that time. I have had one IRS employee tell me over the phone that the “additional tax assessed” transaction code is sometimes used as a “placeholder” just to show that some action was taken on the account… even where clearly no assessment action took place because the ASED had run years ago and the balance continued to show $0. The mind fairly boggles.

The opinion did not much address such things. However, if you are looking for insight on posted dates and cycle numbers you are in luck. I won’t spoil you with the mechanics (some may say, minutia) of their complete inner workings. You can read that for yourself at pages *12 – 14. I will, however, provide the general take-away points.

First of all, a “posted date” is the effective date of the transaction, which is either the actual date the transaction processing was finalized or the date it is deemed to have occurred by law (like withholding always being credited as paid on the last day to timely file). Meanwhile, a “cycle number” pertains to the dates the IRS actually processed the transaction. In the transcripts that are readily available to taxpayers and practitioners, the “cycle number” field is often left blank. This has never bothered me much because on the account transcript alone the cycle number is mostly useless: it leads off with a year (e.g. 2012) and ends with a number that appears to mean nothing. In Luque, for example, the cycle number was 201219, which corresponded to transactions taking place in 2012 over the month of… May. The 19, as far as I can tell, only has meaning if you have access to an IRS list of 2012 cycle numbers with their corresponding dates, as the IRS Appeals Officer does. With access to that list, you can then glean when the transaction was actually processed by the IRS: a three-step procedure concluding, in most cases, with the effective “posting date” (see above) unless there is an otherwise designated effective date.

This is all to say that cycle numbers are unlikely to matter much unless you are playing a game of inches (likely in a statute of limitations scenario). It also serves as a reminder that the law has numerous artificial constructs for when something is deemed to have actually taken place (like when you are deemed to have paid in withholding). Reconciling anomalies in these dates on the IRS records (when the return was filed, when the return was processed, and when the withholding was credited) was the reason the Court felt the matter was not resolved simply by saying “it was a § 6402 offset, and we have no jurisdiction to review those.”

Yet I am actually not convinced that the timing matters so much as to warrant much inquiry in this case. If the IRS can show that the 2009 liability on the books is $4,223 less (the amount of the 2011 credit), can a slight discrepancy in dates really do so much as to call into question if an offset actually occurred at all? Judge Halpern almost acknowledges as much, stating “Although the question of whether the overpayment reported on petitioners’ 2011 return was credited to their 2009 account is more important than precisely when that credit was allowed, the ambiguity in the dates […] called into question the reliability of the respondent’s certifications as evidence that the credit was, in fact, allowed.” Luque at *9. [Emphasis in original.] Of course, the exact date matters quite a bit if the liability causing the offset may have had the CSED run (or if the date to file a refund claim is close). But those issues both involve investigating the propriety of the offset: something § 6412(b)(4) does not allow. The date the offset occurred is essentially moot as far as the Tax Court should be concerned. It may matter, but it would presumably be litigated in a refund suit in district court.

And there, I think, is the lesson behind the opinion: what would be the victory to the taxpayer if the Court found the records so shoddy as to hold that an offset didn’t occur? I imagine the Court could find that the taxpayer is due that amount… which the IRS could promptly credit as an offset. For the Tax Court to do anything else (that is, compel the IRS not to offset) would be a violation of both § 6512(b)(4) and § 6402 since the choice to offset is committed to the IRS’s discretion. Thus, as Judge Halpern intimated, the greater point of the opinion may well be the education of taxpayers and (more likely) practitioners on the mysteries of IRS transcripts such that the issue can be resolved administratively when errors do arise. Failure to actually credit an offset certainly seems to be in the province of TAS, and a tax practitioner is better able to see when such errors arise (or don’t arise) if they have greater knowledge of the transcripts showing them. Indeed, in most cases it is doubtful that the Tax Court will even be able to review if an offset occurred: Luque was fortuitous in that both offset and NOD (i.e. ticket to tax court) occurred for the same tax year.

And that, in turn, allows us to close on what I believe to be the most important point is lurking behind this all: the difficulties of getting to court at all if you are low-income seeking to challenge an ancient, but sizeable, tax debt. Under § 6512(b)(4) when an offset occurs, the taxpayer better look elsewhere than Tax Court to challenge the propriety of the offset. That “elsewhere” is a refund action in federal district court. At least, it ought to be. The restrictions of Flora’s full-pay rule (discussed, among other times, here and here) and § 6512(b)(4) means that when a taxpayer has a substantial past tax debt that current year refunds will never full pay, the taxpayer can pretty much count on losing a refund they may desperately need for the foreseeable future. (Practitioners, of course, should be aware that the IRS offset for past federal income taxes is discretionary, and would do well to acquaint themselves with Offset-Bypass Procedures, discussed here in cases where the taxpayer is suffering hardship.)

Thus, under Flora and § 6512(b)(4), an offset applied to what may well be an inflated underlying liability will continue to haunt the taxpayer with little chance for judicial review. In such situations, the law seems to give short shrift to the right of the taxpayer to “pay no more than the correct amount.” The statutes as written give the Tax Court no power other than to ensure that at least the offset is properly credited to the earlier year… or give us practitioners the tools to read the transcripts and determine exactly when that happened for ourselves.

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Comments

It was about 43 years ago that I first operated an IDRS terminal, in the IRS Springfield IL district office, and learned some of this stuff. Cycle 19 simply means the 19th week of the year. Any discussion of timing problems should include a reference to the DLN (document locator number), which includes a Julian date — the numerical day of the year in the Julian calendar. For example, July 23 is Julian date 203 in leap years (and I don’t remember if IRS uses the different system for leap years). Some transcripts will just have the 3-digit codes and cycle numbers, but to sort out complex problems you should have the DLN’s.

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Leslie Book

Keith Fogg

T. Keith Fogg is a Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where he started a tax clinic in 2015. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, he began his academic career at Villanova Law School in 2007 after working for over 30 years with the Office of Chief Counsel, IRS. Read More…

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